Why do we have to identify ourselves. An interview with the Viennese scientist Daniel Messner
first They conduct research to identify individuals. Why is a relevant research topic today?
practices of identification and related artifacts, such as ID cards or passports, are changing over time. They are embedded in a particular socio-cultural context, a context that is shaped by notions of order and security in the appropriate time. The associated power relations, it is disclosed to counter shorter debates in the present can, in which the historic existence of a specific development will disappear and the actual condition than normal condition is proclaimed.
second Why should anyone be identifiable at all? Respectively. What we lost when everyone is clearly identifiable?
The identification of people has always two aspects: limiting and empowering effects. Limiting, because the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion are established and thus certain people access to a certain space is denied. This unequal power relations also have discriminatory effects. However, the empowering effects must not be ignored: At the state level, for example, means the unique identification and access to civil rights, such as social services, and not just state control.
third Is there a moral limit the identifiability of people?
I would say there is no constant moral line, but moral limits that may vary from time to time, depending on the socio-political context. Two aspects are therefore important for the assessment: First, the aim of identifying - For example, certain groups of people stigmatized or criminalized by the identification of measures - and, secondly, by what methods or measures are identified people. Is it necessary, for example, the fingerprint database, which contains data on all asylum seekers over 14 years, offenders with the database to match?
4th A thought experiment: Would it succeed today someone invented a completely new identity to build?
Absolutely! What does this mean, then, to identify a person? It is an alignment of different data sets that were created by a person at different times and are associated with it. In the moment when the registration office my record under a different name is created, I have a new identity. In such a case will not help either biometrics: My (new) a photograph of it is simply assigned a different name. The coupling of biometric data and person is much more fragile than we commonly think, closed the gap between humans and the document no. Attempts a new identity, there is therefore often: asylum seekers who destroy their identity documents in order to avoid removal, or witness protection programs.
Daniel Messner, born in 1979 in Regensburg. After working on the study of history and philosophy at the universities of Regensburg and Vienna I since 2010 as a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of History at the University of Vienna. In my thesis I explore the Ausverhandlungssprozesse the Identitifzierungstechniken photography, anthropometry and fingerprint data relating to the emergence of recognition services in 1900. (
http://identifizierung.org) More about: Thomas Claes, passport control. A critical history of the purposes of identification and be recognized, published in the past, new publishing
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